14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Much less than I hoped for, September 26, 2008
This review is from: Alfred and Emily (Hardcover)
This is a somewhat unusual book. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing chose to write about her parents, Alfred Taylor and Emily McVeigh, but rather than stick to their actual lives she took the liberty in the first half of the book to imagine them as they might have been had there never been a World War I. The second half of the book deals with them as they actually were.
Lessing imagines her parents as what they seemed to have wanted to be-a farmer and a head nurse-who never married each other. The farmer had a wife and family. The nurse married a doctor who was not a very loving individual and who died young. Alfred and Emily met each other, but never were a couple, in their daughter's imagination.
The imagined story is stilted and old-fashioned in style. Possibly because the main characters were people she knew well in other circumstances, Lessing doesn't do much with their development. While events occur, she doesn't really give any insight as to why the individuals behave as they do. Toward to end of the novella she finally gives them some life, but by then it is hard remain interested.
The second half of the book that tells about their real life is rather rambling and disjointed. Lessing is 87 years old and in the manner of many older people she seems to repeat herself fairly often while describing her parents' life.
The real Alfred Taylor wanted to be a farmer, but he went to "The Great War" and lost most of his right leg from shrapnel wound. He spent a very long time in the hospital recovering and that is where he met his wife, Emily McVeigh, a nurse. She was a wonderfully talented upper-middle-class woman who decided to defy her father's wishes and became a nurse. After the war they moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Alfred tried to farm, but nothing about the land was like the English farm of his dreams. Emily suffered from a nervous breakdown and Alfred was always suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
I suspect that readers who are very familiar with Doris Lessing and her other works might find this book enjoyable. I don't feel that it holds up well alone. Lessing seems to expect that the reader already knows a great deal about her life. That, coupled with the disjointed style, makes the book less than I had hoped for from a writer of her stature.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life is hard even if one can make a remarkable story of it, January 4, 2010
In the first part of the book Doris Lessing imagines her parents lives as if they had lived easier and happier lives, lives in which they did not marry each other. Lessing is a first- rate storyteller and thus this part of the work is readable. But it is not really deep in feeling and not compelling on an emotional level.
In the second part she tells the story of her father who lost a leg in the First War, and also lost most of his good friends there. A tough and determined character haunted by nightmares of the war he went on to make a new life for himself and his family- though the injuries of the war soon got to him and he died quite young at sixty after suffering greatly. Her mother who nursed the father during the war and enjoyed the time of their social whirl in Tehran also had an extremely difficult life. Lessing speaks of her terrible conflict with her mother and her having married to get away from her. She describes the world of her Rhodesian early years and the period of her early adulthood right after the war. She has a great ability to create an atmosphere of Time and Place. In speaking of her parents difficult emotional lives she makes the comment that 'children learn the emotions of their parents'. Certainly she gives a sense of having some of the same kind of toughness, and determination that her parents had. She also speaks of her mother's remarkable storytelling ability and how this was transmitted to her. This comes as a kind of grudging thank- you note to a mother who she repeatedly accuses of having interfered too much her life. Lessing also tells the story of her brother who narrowly survived the sinking of his ship in the Second World War, and who lived for many years with what she calls a kind of 'dullness' of mind. In an incident which sounds like it comes from one of the books of Oliver Sachs her brother received a knock on the head in his latter years, and it suddenly brought back the clarity of consciousness he had had before the ship incident. He died not long after claiming that most of his adult life he had lived being absent from himself. Here too Lessing describes the life of one she is very close to in a very effective way, but somehow without great warmth or loving feeling.
For Lessing Life seems to be hard even if one is able to make a remarkable story of it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a fascinating combo historical biographical fiction and a short biography, October 26, 2009
"Alfred and Emily: A Novella". Alfred Taylor is a farmer who becomes affluent and marries a warm caring local. Ignoring the rage of her father, Emily McVeagh leaves town and goes to London where she becomes a nurse who marries a doctor. World War I never occurs so they never meet as a wounded soldier and a nurse.
"Alfred and Emily; Two Lives. Alfred Taylor was severely injured in combat on the continent. He was medically evacuated back to a London hospital. There he met Nurse Emily McVeigh. As he healed, they fell in love and got married. They move to Rhodesia after the war and have two children Doris and Harry, but their colonial farm fails.
This is a fascinating combo historical biographical fiction and a short biography. The novella is a terrific alternate history of the author's parents while the biography provides a short guide to compare what if to what happened. Fans of the great author will appreciate this fine book although the fiction overwhelms the nonfiction as the latter is too minute for newbies and too repetitive for fans while the former provides an intriguing look at probably what would not have happened if the liberating of the masses did not happen because the mechanism WWI was never fought.
Harriet Klausner
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